Fate Core Beta Thread II - The Empire Strikes Back

[Colen]

Greetings Fate Core players,

Thanks for your feedback in the Fate Core Beta Thread! I spent a while reading through everyone's posts there, and picked out a few of the more popular requests that I have questions about. I'd like to know more about the following:

1. We had several requests for support of Fate Accelerated Edition in the thread. My original assumption was that it wouldn't be useful to support FAE because the game is so simple, but apparently a bunch of you think otherwise. What do you see the big benefit of FAE support in Hero Lab is?
   
2. A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.
   
3. One thing I saw a couple of requests for is "Break columns while advancing a character". Does that mean when advancing you want to ignore the column restrictions entirely? Or something else?
   
4. Several people asked for "Extras". For everyone who wanted Extras, it sounds like some of you meant that you wanted a table to which you could add anything you want, and track a numeric value along with it. Would that satisfy what you need, or would you need something more complex?
   
5. Another common request was "The Fate Fractal - Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth". How exactly would this work?

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! If you have more suggestions or ideas, feel free to share them here also.

[Shadowchaser]

Originally Posted by Colen

Greetings Fate Core players,

Thanks for your feedback in the Fate Core Beta Thread! I spent a while reading through everyone's posts there, and picked out a few of the more popular requests that I have questions about. I'd like to know more about the following:

1. We had several requests for support of Fate Accelerated Edition in the thread. My original assumption was that it wouldn't be useful to support FAE because the game is so simple, but apparently a bunch of you think otherwise. What do you see the big benefit of FAE support in Hero Lab is?
   
2. A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.
   
3. One thing I saw a couple of requests for is "Break columns while advancing a character". Does that mean when advancing you want to ignore the column restrictions entirely? Or something else?
   
4. Several people asked for "Extras". For everyone who wanted Extras, it sounds like some of you meant that you wanted a table to which you could add anything you want, and track a numeric value along with it. Would that satisfy what you need, or would you need something more complex?
   
5. Another common request was "The Fate Fractal - Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth". How exactly would this work?

Thanks for your feedback, everyone! If you have more suggestions or ideas, feel free to share them here also.

Good questions! I'll take a stab at them here:

1) Fate Accelerated replaces the Skills concept with the Approaches concept in order to streamline the presentation. In doing so, they created a much faster way to create characters and also a new paradigm in how characters can be represented "Personality first" instead of "Capabilities first." A lot of people find this approach (nyuck!) appealing and useful. I personally have used a hybrid method combining approaches with skills, and find that also useful. An Approaches tab that you could turn on or off at the Configure Character screen would be pretty useful.

2) Campaigns in Fate are represented by their own sheet for a reason. They have Aspects which represent Themes, and these aspects are called upon during gameplay and can be *changed* by Milestones. Being able to create a Fate Campaign sheet and linking that to my players would be SUPER useful, as I would be able to build the campaign sheet, set the rules for that particular campaign, and then forward that to them to automatically configure their characters. Failing that, a Campaign Sheet tab on the character would be a way to start it off. I could fill out that part of the character sheet, save it as a "Template" character portfolio, and forward *that* to the players to use for character creation.

3) It's impossible to advance a skill by one skill rank without "breaking" the skill columns rule unless you start from the very bottom of your skill pyramid. This isn't very useful for progression. The ability to have one or two skills "unsupported" by a column has become pretty much necessary in our campaigns in order to allow players an organic skill progression. The Skill Cap for the campaign, the uppermost tier of a skill, still can't be changed without spending a Major Milestone, however.

4) I think that works as a kludge. For instance, if I wanted to add Armor: 2 to a character, I'd need the ability to put in that Armor description and the number 2. The ability to add a note explaining how the number is applied is important. A variable cost in Refresh would also help, as most Extras cost Refresh. In my upcoming Superhero game, we're using a set of "Super Points" to represent Refresh-that-is-only-for-buying-Super-Powers so characters don't burn through their Refresh in character creation... so something that let us customize that without a lot of trouble would help, but probably isn't super necessary. Another example would be for our Fate campaign: Tianixa: Blood, Silk & Jade. In that setting, you gain a number of specialized stunts to represent your Kung Fu. We keep those Kung Fu forms and such set aside in their own category because they are thematically different from the standard Stunts in Fate Core.

5) The Fate Fractal is part of what makes Fate pretty amazing. Basically, any element you want to add into a campaign can be described using the same concepts as a player character. For example, a magic sword that is important enough could be called out on its own, given a set of Aspects (one or more), a Skill, an Extra or Stunt, and so on. A Boy Wonder sidekick could be a more fleshed-out character with a full set of skills and such, but designed with a different set of Stress checkboxes and no Consequences, and no refresh (he's essentially a "Feature" of the parent character). You can also create character-like traits for a game element run by the GM, such as a murder mystery. The mystery itself can be represented by aspects and skills, as it "actively" resists the attempts by the players to solve it.

Hope that was helpful!

[Sketchpad]

Hey there Colen!

Originally Posted by Colen

1. We had several requests for support of Fate Accelerated Edition in the thread. My original assumption was that it wouldn't be useful to support FAE because the game is so simple, but apparently a bunch of you think otherwise. What do you see the big benefit of FAE support in Hero Lab is?

Guilty as charged. For me, the benefits include tracking experience through HL, and having files that can be shared between my players on hand. Many of the gamers in my group use HL and having FAE for them would be awesome!

Originally Posted by Colen

1. A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.

I haven't had a chance to try this yet. I'm hoping to work with it this weekend. I did play with the editor a bit, but not to any major ends yet.

Originally Posted by Colen

1. Several people asked for "Extras". For everyone who wanted Extras, it sounds like some of you meant that you wanted a table to which you could add anything you want, and track a numeric value along with it. Would that satisfy what you need, or would you need something more complex?

I'd be willing to give it a shot. Extras are only as complex as you want them to be. You'd have to be able to track the amount based on your Refresh IIRC.

Originally Posted by Colen

1. Another common request was "The Fate Fractal - Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth". How exactly would this work?

I was thinking about this the other night. Maybe make it as an additional character that someone could put into play, like a familiar in Pathfinder or Sidekick in M&M? Maybe make a drop down menu for what purpose they serve (vehicle, sidekick, base, etc.)?

Hope this helps.

[Steev42]

Originally Posted by Colen

[*]A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.

I played around with creating a campaign using the editor. It was somewhat unfunctional. Skills added to the campaign didn't show up unless they were added as tags (instead of the easy "campaign skills" box). I'd also like to see some way of adding campaign aspects, and in general, other things from the campaign worksheet.

Originally Posted by Colen

[*]Several people asked for "Extras". For everyone who wanted Extras, it sounds like some of you meant that you wanted a table to which you could add anything you want, and track a numeric value along with it. Would that satisfy what you need, or would you need something more complex?
[*]Another common request was "The Fate Fractal - Using fate attributes to make sidekicks, vehicles, special weapons, and so forth". How exactly would this work?

I actually look at these two as being part of the same thing. Many 'extras' take the form of sub-characters/sidekicks/etc. with aspects, skills, stress, consequences and stunts of their own. You can kind of work around this by creating a separate character at the moment, but with skills especially, a free-form entry would be helpful. With the current drag-and-drop mechanism, that's not possible.

To further the explanation, I'd want to treat them as a familiar in Pathfinder. The ability to click on a button to bring up the secondary sheet, and another to go back, tying them to the same profile, is the way to go.

Other extras might be campaign-related. Races, for instance, in a fantasy game. These might just be name and description for the most part, but it would be awesome to have them included in a campaign or not.

[THX472]

I'd really like to see the ability to add custom stress tracks using the Editor. And with that, some way to make custom stress tracks appear when certain stunts or skills are taken.

[Colen]

Beta 2 is now out, including the following changes:

• You can now add custom skills on the Skills tab.
• Extreme Consequences can now be added, although it's up to you to change the hero's aspects appropriately.
• Custom stress tracks can now be created in the editor.
• Note for everyone who used the old stunts from Spirit of the Century: Due to changes in the data files, you'll need to re-add these to your character after loading the data files.
• Fixed a couple of bugs, including not being able to properly define new campaigns in the editor.

Anyone who signed up for beta testing should be getting an email with the details soon!

[TheGM]

Just tried it with the portfolio that was done with the Beta 1.
The Refresh is still unaffected by a negative Permanent Adjustment in the Personal folder. It stays at 3 no matter what your negative adjustment is. But you can raise the refresh.

The reduction of refresh is needed as you play a lot of stuff with a reduced Refresh (Extras, Stunts, ..)

[iamarogue]

Originally Posted by Colen

[*]A number of people asked about custom campaigns. You can currently implement custom campaigns in one of two ways. The Easy Way is to go to the Personal tab and add permanent adjustments to adjust the campaign to your liking. The Slightly Less Easy Way is to use Hero Lab's integrated editor (find it on the Tools menu) for building your campaign exactly to your liking, which you can then distribute to your friends.

I think the point is this: Fate is such a hack-able system that any software that uses it needs to be likewise hack-able. I have used the permanent adjustments and found that they're not customizable enough. I have dabbled in the editor and found that it's just not intuitive enough. (I'm not a programmer and it feels like programming; and it seems to me that the ease of making your character with paper and pencil outweighs the benefit you would get from customizing through the editor)

I would appreciate an option when you first load up a new character, like in the Pathfinder RPG, you get a window that lets you specify campaign options (i.e. what sourcebooks to allow, how to generate ability scores, starting gold, how prevalent guns are, etc.). Then you could save this set of options not just as the "default" but you could also save the set of options as a Campaign.

In this options window, you could specify things like: skills pyramid or skills ladder? Whether to use extras or not, and which extras? Etc.

[Territan]

I have a custom data file for my campaign, which is a bit more high-powered (an extra optional Aspect and Refresh) and uses two custom skills.

The campaign comes up all right everywhere, including the Campaign Settings and Campaign picker, but when I pick that campaign, the entire skill list—all eighteen normal Fate Core skills and the two custom skills, every skill I had picked for that campaign—disappears.

The two custom skills I added are checked off on the list of available skills to add to the campaign, but they don't appear in the actual portfolio editor.

Is there something additional I should be doing to the campaign to set the skill list?

[Elindor]

Originally Posted by Territan

I have a custom data file for my campaign, which is a bit more high-powered (an extra optional Aspect and Refresh) and uses two custom skills.

The campaign comes up all right everywhere, including the Campaign Settings and Campaign picker, but when I pick that campaign, the entire skill list—all eighteen normal Fate Core skills and the two custom skills, every skill I had picked for that campaign—disappears.

The two custom skills I added are checked off on the list of available skills to add to the campaign, but they don't appear in the actual portfolio editor.

Is there something additional I should be doing to the campaign to set the skill list?

There was a bug with the previous version where the skill picker wasn't adding the skills to the campaign properly. That's been fixed in the latest version (which also requires the latest version [4.3a] of Hero Lab). If you had created the campaign file before the latest update, you should be able to add them with the new update through the skill selector in the editor.